1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a chip feeding system and, more particularly, to a system and method for separating chip components, such as electronic chip components, to thereby allow for individual feeding of the components.
2. Description of the Related Art
A separating feeder having substantially increased capacity for feeding chip components over that of an oscillating ball feeder or a linear feeder has been disclosed in, for example, Japanese Examined Utility Model Publication No. 62-28592. In this separating feeder, a rotating inner disk and an outer disk, which intermittently rotates along the outer periphery of the inner disk, are disposed at a slant to a horizontal plane. The outer disk has an annular trough comprised of a plurality of fitting holes for aligning chip components. The annular trough is disposed at the same level as the end of the inner disk.
The inner disk and the outer disk are rotated in opposite directions to each other. As a result of the rotation of the inner and outer disks, the chip components are individually separated by dropping through the fitting holes. While this process efficiently separates circular disk-shaped chip components, rectangular-shaped chip components fall less effectively through the fitting holes, which decreases feeding efficiency. When small size chip components (e.g., chip components having a size of approximately 1 mm) are provided, orientation of the chip components dropped into the fitting holes may be unstable, since the fitting hole size should also be small in size. This results in a reduction of reliability.